


7.35: Xenobiology in Theory and Practice

by LemonScience33



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Awkwardness, Character Study, College, F/M, Gen, Kaiju, Kaiju (Pacific Rim), MIT Era, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Mentions of Death, Newt being awkward as fuck, written by an MIT student
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-20
Updated: 2014-05-20
Packaged: 2018-01-25 21:36:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,282
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1663283
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LemonScience33/pseuds/LemonScience33
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Newt is great at making acquaintances and astonishingly bad at anything more intimate than that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	7.35: Xenobiology in Theory and Practice

**Author's Note:**

  * For [makokitten](https://archiveofourown.org/users/makokitten/gifts), [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).



> Minor end spoiler for _Godzilla_ (2014).

_Course 7 (Biology)_

_7.35: Xenobiology in Theory and Practice_

_Massachusetts Institute of Technology_

_May 2015_

 

* * *

 

 

The pretty brunette with the undercut is always early to seminar. Her name is Chelsea. While she waits for the final class to start, she sets out her notebook, a pencil, and a white gum eraser. Then she glances up at Newt with a tiny smile and smooths down her hair.  
  
  
Chelsea’s redheaded friend Emily arrives on time for once and slips into the open seat next to her. She gives Newt a bright grin and a little wave.  
  
  
Afterward, Emily stays to ask Newt a question about the final paper, which is due next week, while Chelsea hangs back and jots something down in her notebook. Emily is writing about a promising new method of kaiju blue cleanup being developed at Caltech. Honestly, her question could probably be better answered by Professor Hynes, but Newt likes feeling like a good TA.  
  
  
~~~  
  
  
Emily knocks on the door of Newt’s office the Monday after finals week. She’s wearing a low-cut shirt that is printed with a parody of vintage B-movie posters. It features a busty woman gasping in horror at a bearded cat, beneath the dramatic title _Aliens Gave My Cat a Beard!_  
  
  
“So, listen,” she says after a moment’s hesitation, fingers playing with the hem of her yellow skirt. “The new _Godzilla_ movie got leaked in Asia – the one that was supposed to have been released here last May until they decided it was in bad taste or something?” She laughs self-consciously and touches her neck. “My boyfriend got a bootleg English dub. You could come over and watch it if you wanted… To celebrate the term being over and grades being in…”  
  
  
Newt only has a couple of friends on campus, and despite being a graduate student for the fourth time, he’s only a year older than her.  
  
  
“I’m free Thursday night,” he finds himself saying.  
  
  
“Okay, cool." Emily flushes from her face down to the neckline of her shirt. “Do you mind if Chel comes, too?” she’s saying while Newt tries not to look at her cleavage. “Neither of us had seen any of the daikaiju films until a few months ago, so we’ve been watching them together.”  
  
  
Two new friends. This will be good.  
  
  
~~~  
  
  
Newt texts Emily when he arrives at East Campus _._  
  
  
 _Fifth floor of the east parallel,_ she texts back. _Do you need me to let you in, or can you door surf?_  
  
  
A barefoot, red-mohawked undergrad opens the door with their ID, and Newt slips in after them. _Im good, omw up_  
  
  
Emily greets him with a hug. Her room looks like it’s been hastily cleaned, and Newt bets there are things underneath the bed that he doesn’t want to know about. He feels right at home. “Chel couldn’t come tonight, sorry. She… well, to be honest, she got too nervous.” Emily smiles and leans in conspiratorially. “She has sort of a crush on you.”  
  
  
Newt feels himself blush and _hmmms_ noncommittally. Emily laughs and takes his coat.  
  
  
The movie is perfect. It is monsters and roaring and fire-breathing money shots and dull characters who fulfill a narrative role and nothing more. In short, it’s everything Newt loves about daikaiju films.  
  
  
Godzilla rises from his apparent death, gives a bellow, and slips back into the ocean, and Emily might be crying a little bit. Which, okay, Newt kind of knows the feeling.  
  
  
She lies back on the bed with her head against his thigh. Her breasts are spilling out of her top, and they look especially fantastic from this angle. “Sometimes I wish Godzilla would come and restore the natural balance, you know? Like he does when the MUTOs attack.”  
  
  
Newt wishes a lot of things. He wishes he could learn everything about the kaiju without them destroying the planet while he learned it. He wishes he had more time and more data and fewer responsibilities to MIT. He wishes, suddenly, that this girl did not have a boyfriend.  
  
  
And then, as if she knows what he’s thinking – which she may, because somehow his hand has made it into her hair, which is very soft, and –  
  
  
“Newt, you know I’m in an open relationship, right?  
  
  
Oh.  
  
  
She sits up and leans toward him a little bit. “My boyfriend said I could fuck you if I wanted. I’ve been telling him all semester how passionate you are about xenobiology..." She gives him a once-over. "And how much you turn me on.”  
  
  
 _Oh._  
  
  
“I… I don’t –” Newt sputters. “I mean, you’re very –” he gestures at her body, “but I don’t –”

 

“It’s okay,” Emily says quickly. “I wanna be friends. It’s okay if you don’t want to fuck me.”  
  
  
Newt shakes his head because that is not what he meant at all, and fuck, this is not going well. _Of course_ this isn’t going well.  
  
  
“No, I mean, it's not like that. See, it's. It's been awhile and you're...” _smart and h_ _ot and_ really _forward,_ “and it's kind of intimidating me right now.” He clears his throat. The full truth is he lost his virginity at a Senior Haus party at 18 (year 4 of undergrad) and has had sex a grand total of six times in the six years since.

 

That (not) said, fortune favors the brave. “Let’s do it, dude,” he says before he can think better of it.  
  
  
Emily chews her bottom lip. “Yeah?”  
  
  
He swallows and nods enthusiastically. “Yeah.”  
  
  
And Newt must look more confident than he feels, because Emily grins. “Right on,” she says, and kisses him on the mouth.  
  
  
~~~  
  
  
She’s _riding him_ and she’s making the best sounds, and she’s _loud._ Maybe the sex hormones are really messing with his perception, but he’s pretty sure her screams are hitting the glass side of the Media Lab across the street and echoing back through her open window. Newt is gripping her hips and trying not to come, but then she’s clenching around his cock _again_ , and it’s too much. He spills inside her with a groan.  
  
  
It’s even better than the movie was.  
  
  
Afterward, she traces Trespasser on his shoulder, and Newt can feel her fingers trembling. For a moment he thinks it’s from the sex, but…  
  
  
“My best friend, Roy,” she says quietly, and Newt's stomach sinks, and he knows he’s about to fuck this up, can see this friendship flash before his eyes before it even really starts. “He was working in Mountain View when Trespasser hit the Bay area. He left me a voicemail that just said, ‘I love you.’” She exhales a shaky laugh. “I took a year off MIT after, because, y’know… It took awhile for things to be okay again.”  
  
  
Newt has no idea what to say, which probably means he should keep his mouth shut. Instead, he offers some awkward condolences and says that at least if her friend had to die it was by something as awesome as a kaiju, and that... was the _wrong_ thing to say. Fuck.  
  
  
Newt thinks, bewildered, that this is what he gets for trying to make friends.  
  
  
They don’t fuck again. They don’t really become friends, either.  
  
  
Emily halfheartedly offers to set him up with Chel, but Newt is great at making acquaintances and astonishingly bad at anything more intimate than that, so he turns her down.  
  
  
He holes up in his lab, responds to the latest letter from Dr. Hermann Gottlieb, and tries not to think about the fact that if he ever met the man, he would probably fuck that up, too.

 

* * *

  
  
Newt meets Hermann two years later.  
  
  
They don’t even have sex, but Newt manages to fuck it up anyway.

**Author's Note:**

> This started as a self-insert and became a character study. Chel and Emily are based on a friend and I, both MIT students. That said, I tried to write things how I think they'd honestly go, which is badly. My headcanon is that something like this happened to Newt at some point, though obviously not with me.
> 
> Roy is my best friend and really does live in Mountain View. I called him last summer on K-Day, just in case.


End file.
